--Monica Lewinsky got a White House internship in 1995. That’s an unpaid position working in the White
House, which is a standard way to get started in Washington if you 1) are a member of the President’s party
and 2) can afford to work without pay. She was 21, just graduated from Lewis and Clark College in
Portland OR. Her dad is a prominent doctor in LA; her mom just wrote a trashy expose on the sex lives of
the 3 Tenors. In fact, according to Newsweek, Lewinsky's mom drafted a press release for her book that implied
she slept with Placido Domingo, giving her "inside" knowledge. Domingo denies having an affair with her.

--Lewinsky by all accounts had a major crush on Clinton. She got herself a paid job with the Office of
Legislative Affairs, and was eventually transferred to work very close to him.

-- Apparently, on taped phone calls secretly taped by her friend Linda Tripp, Lewinsky says she had oral sex with Clinton, and that he
called her several times late at night for phone sex (meaning, mutual masturbation while talking on the
phone.) (Only part of one tape has been made public.) On one of the
excerpts of the tapes that Newsweek has released, Lewinsky states that she already had
a government job when she got involved with Clinton.

-- Lewinsky also reportedly said on one tape that Clinton does not consider oral sex to be adultery.
He is said to have told an Arkansas trooper the same thing back in the 1980s.
Alert readers will remember that one woman who admitted an affair with
Newt Gingrich said he preferred oral sex in his extramarital affairs because he could deny sleeping with the women.
Staff members for Virginia Democratic Senator Robb also have made similar statements, explaining his denials.

As it turns out, Clinton's definitional defense was a little different; the question asked of him basically said, "Did you do anything to her?" And he is
saying, No, she did all the doing. That means he did not touch her breasts or genitals with intent to arouse at any time.

-- Clinton gave her several gifts. Her lawyer says that these include a sleeve of golf balls, ash trays and a souvenir hat from Martha's Vineyard, where
Clinton and his family vacation. Press reports also say that Clinton gave Lewinsky a blue dress (see "Evidence -- Gifts" below)
and a book of poetry, Walt Whitman’s famous “Leaves of Grass.” One reporter claims that Canto 5 of
“Song of Myself” is
famous as a reference to oral sex. More generally, “Leaves of Grass” is the most famous book of American
poetry and the kind of thing that earnest young romantics really dig. Lewinsky's attorney denied that she got a blue dress, "unless you consider a long t-shirt a dress."

-- Lewinsky told reporters last summer, before the scandal broke, that she gave Clinton a tie he wore during a televised speech. (A Clinton supporter claims
he actually gave the tie.) Lewinsky also placed a Valentine's Day ad for Clinton in the Washington Post last year, according to the Post, which cited unreleased
tapes of Lewinsky's phone call as a source. You'll have to scroll down quite aways in this long Washington Post story to find this item.

-- Lewinsky's credibility is an issue, and not just because of the attacks you'd expect from Clinton allies.
Several people Newsweek interviewed for their initial story, before the White House even knew about it, said that Lewinsky bragged a lot about her political connections
and affairs, and it would not be unlike her to invent or embellish an affair like this. On one tape, Lewinsky herself says
"I was brought up with lies all the time... that's how you got along... I have lied my entire life..." Her own attorney contradicted many of the allegations made in the tapes, saying
"There are people who talk a lot and as part of the scenario, peccadilloes, they may tell fibs, lies, exaggerations, oversell." He went on to say that she is "totally reliable," however.
And a drama teacher she had an affair with says that she had "a pattern of twisting the facts,"
especially to bolster her ego, and that he doesn't believe her allegations about sex with Clinton.

-- Clinton's former Deputy Chief of Staff, Evelyn Lieberman says that she forced Lewinsky to transfer to the
Pentagon because she was behaving “inappropriately” around the President – wearing super short dresses,
and being too flirtatious. Lieberman, a close friend of Hillary Clinton, has denied that she knew of any incident between Clinton and Lewinsky.

-- Lewinsky visited the Oval Office 37 times after her transfer, logging in as coming to visit Clinton’s private
secretary, Betty Currie, who is famously loyal and discreet. Her immediate supervisor at the Pentagon said it was not part of her job to visit the White House.

She visited as recently as December 28, 1997, according to
the
Washington Post. That was 20 months after she stopped working at the White House, and 11 days after she was subpoenaed by Paula Jones' lawyers, and 10 days before she filed her affidavit denying
an affair with Clinton. It was also 2 days after she quit her Pentagon job and 2 days before she had Vernon Jordan-arranged interviews
with Revlon and Burson-Marsteller in New York City. (Revlon offered her a job; Burson-Marsteller did not.)

-- One of her new co-workers at the Pentagon was Linda Tripp, one of only two Bush Administration
holdovers, and a woman who had testfied against the Clinton White House in the “filegate” incident. She
had tried to sell an expose book on Clinton, including a chapter on Clinton’s women, for $500,000 to a conservative publisher
(Regnery, which published Gary Aldrich's widely discredited book) but was turned down by publishers.

-- In the summer of 1997, after her book failure, Tripp’s acquaintance and literary agent Lucianne Goldberg
recommended she start taping her conversations with Lewinsky. Tripp, in her late 40s, had befriended
Lewinsky and had many stereotypical “girl talk” conversations with her, bemoaning what a dog Clinton
was but how much Lewinsky cared for him, etc.

-- Goldberg is herself a Republican activist. She went so far as to spy on the McGovern campaign in 1972
for Richard Nixon in 1972, while falsely claiming to be a reporter. In her recent comments, she is clearly spinning this to
damage Democrats; she said "this is not about money, but about the lack of controlling moral authority at
the White House." Note what she is doing here – paraphrasing Al Gore’s infamous comment about “controlling legal
authority” to try to drag Gore into this, even though there is no connection to Gore at all.

After Tripp had taped about 20 hours of phone conversations on Radio Shack 120 minute tapes, she went to her attorney (Kirby Behre,
at that time) and asked him to arrange for her to wear a wire to a lunch meeting with Lewinsky, to confirm the tapes. Behre refused.
Tripp fired him and found a new lawyer, conservative activist James Moody, who contacted Special Prosecutor Starr. Starr's office arranged for FBI agents
to set up the wire.

-- This all came to a head, so to speak, because of the Paula Jones case depositions. Lewinsky and Clinton
were both questioned under oath and denied they had a sexual relationship. (No one knows how Jones’
lawyers knew to ask, but most people presume that Tripp had contacted them.) Only parts of the tapes have been
made public, and reports vary, but Lewinsky apparently said or implied to Tripp that Clinton or his friend
Vernon Jordan had encouraged her to deny any sex between them.

-- Jordan has said that he tried to help find her a job. Revlon, of which Jordan is
on the board of directors, offered her a job. The timing of the job offer was amazingly coincidental with Lewinsky's affidavit in the Paula Jones case,
where she denied an affair with the president. Jordan also arranged interviews for her at American Express and Burson-Marsteller, which did not offer her jobs. Bill
Richardson, Clinton's ambassador to the United Nations, had offered her a job earlier, which she turned
down. [White House interns expect to get these kinds of job offers through connections, that’s why they
work for free, but it’s unusual for someone of Jordan’s stature to work so hard on behalf of one intern.
Richardson's offer was par for the course – interns are preferred because they already have security
clearances.]

-- Jordan also found her a respected defense lawyer, Frank Carter, and drove her to a meeting with him.
We aren't sure what was said during that trip, but apparently Lewinsky says on tape that Jordan encouraged her to remain silent and said that witnesses
in civil suits are almost never prosecuted for perjury, which is in fact true. In the tapes the FBI made at Lewinsky's
lunch with Tripp, Lewinsky quoted Jordan as saying "As long as you say it didn't happen, then it didn't happen. You're not going to jail. You're not going to jail."
Of course, Jordan -- being a very savvy, inside lawyer -- would normally be expected to have chosen his words more carefully to not actually encourage lying, while
still getting his message across. That is every bit as sleazy, of course, but not illegal. He has denied encouraging her to lie.

-- Lewinsky also met with Clinton on December 28 at the White House, again after she had been subpoenaed. Again, we don't know exactly what they discussed, but
investigators are suspicious that Clinton told her to deny an affair at that time. On the tape excerpt printed in Newsweek, Tripp clearly tries to get Lewinsky to say that Clinton "knows you're going to lie,"
and Lewinsky balks.

Tripp: He [Clinton] knows you're going to lie. You've told him, haven't you?
Lewinsky: No.
Tripp: I thought that night when he called you established that much.
Lewinsky: Well, I mean, [I] don't know.
Tripp: Jesus. Well, does he think you're going to tell the truth?
Lewinsky: No... Oh, Jesus.

-- Lewinsky apparently asked Tripp to say she knew nothing of any relationship between Clinton and
Lewinsky. She also provided her with “talking points” for her to include in an affidavit that related to Katherine Willey's alleged makeout
session with Clinton (see Evidence, below.) There are not even any rumors floating around about who provided those
'talking points.' But the most damning part is that the "Talking Points" recommend that Tripp show her affidavit to Clinton's attorney, Bob Bennet, before she turned
it in. In any case, Tripp told Lewinsky she wouldn’t lie about it.

-- About this time, Tripp went to Whitewater prosecutor Ken Starr’s office with her evidence, notably the
tapes and talking points. Starr had her set up a meeting with Lewinsky, where Tripp wore a recording
device and tried to get Lewinsky to repeat her allegations. Apparently she was a bit more vague, especially
about any pressure to lie, but confirmed the sex parts. [Again, the tapes are not public yet; this is all based
on unconfirmed leaks.]

-- Starr’s office put very heavy pressure on Lewinsky to turn state’s evidence. They had Tripp arrange
another meeting, at which several FBI agents and Starr assistants took Lewinsky off to a motel room and
pressured her to cooperate in return for immunity. They threatened to prosecute her and even her mother
for felony obstruction of justice and her for perjury (though that is very rare in civil cases like the Paula
Jones suit.) They wanted her to help them gather evidence against Clinton and Jordan, undercover. Starr
says that this 24 year old was free to leave, but they told her that the moment she left the hotel, their offer
was off and they would go after her. She consulted with her mother (who came over) and their attorney,
who was in California, and decided to turn them down.

The tapes themselves are questionable as evidence. It’s illegal to tape a conversation or phone call without
both parties’ permission in many states, including Maryland where these phone calls were taped. Funny, we
don’t hear Ken Starr talking about prosecuting Tripp for illegal wiretapping. But it may ruin the value of
the tapes as evidence.

There are apparently some other tapes, answering machine cassettes that Monica Lewinsky may have kept. Linda Tripp
says that Lewinsky played such tapes to prove to her that the President called. An unnamed source quoted in the
LA Times says that there were such tapes, but that the messages on them were innocuous (or at least ambiguous), such as
'I wish you were there at home so I could talk to you.' " Any tapes proving that Clinton called Lewinsky at home would be striking, of course. When asked
whether Lewinsky played any answering machine tapes for Tripp, her lawyer Ginsburg said "I don't know of any tapes, and I don't know that she ever did that."
The unnamed source however said it was like Lewinksy to keep the tapes.

-- 'Talking Points' Given to Linda Tripp

Lewinsky gave Tripp a set of "Talking Points", that is, things to say,
for her affidavit in the Paula Jones case. These "talking points" were described as "too
sophisticated for a 24 year old to write, and too amateur for a lawyer" by Linda Tripp's attorney.
[That's pure speculation and
demeaning to 24 year-olds. Most good high school debaters could write a decent set of "talking points"
from a legal point of view.]

Amazingly enough, no one in the press is speculating as to who might have written these talking points. The
FBI is checking them for latent fingerprints. Another interesting point is that they appear
to have been taken from a longer document.

-- Gifts.

Starr’s office searched Lewinsky’s apartment – which, ironically, is in the Watergate building – and seized the book
of poetry, blue dress and other gifts Monica refers to in phone calls. In one call she apparently said there
was a semen stain by Clinton on the blue dress, and Starr’s people are hoping they can get a DNA test
match. You’d think Lewinsky would’ve washed the dress, but maybe she had her own weird variation on “I’ll never
wash that hand again."

The first leaks about DNA tests on clothes that were taken from Lewinsky's apartment say that no evidence of Clinton's DNA was found, and that the seized clothes had all been dry cleaned.
In fact, Lewinsky's attorney Ginsburg denies now that Clinton gave her a dress, "unless you consider a long T-shirt a dress," and implied that she
exaggerated these facts in her phone calls to Tripp. Ginsburg says that the gifts from Clinton were "small and inconsequential", all things you could buy in the White House Gift Shop.
He did confirm a gift of a souvenir hat purchased in Martha's Vineyard while Clinton was on vacation with his family.

Newsweek's cover story reports that between Oct. 7 and Dec. 8, Lewinsky sent eight packages by courier from the Pentagon, where she worked, to
Clinton's personal secretary, Betty Currie, at the White House, and one to Vernon Jordan's office, according to courier company employees. On some of Tripp's tapes, Lewinsky apparently says that these were gifts for Clinton.

-- White House logs.

Visitors to the Oval Office need to log in and out. This only shows that the person was in the Oval Ofice, of
course, but it is extremely unusual for anyone to visit the White House as much as Lewinksy did. Lewinsky signed in 37 times between April 1996 and December 1997, according to White House "wave" records,
listing herself as visiting Betty Currie (Clinton's personal secretary). In one of the Linda Tripp tapes, Lewinsky reportedly says that Clinton told her to say she was visiting Currie when she visited him.
Currie's desk is just outside the Oval Office door.

Kenneth Bacon, who is the chief Pentagon spokesman and was also Lewinksy's immediate supervisor when she worked there, said "It was not part of her official duties to go to the White House."

-- Possible Witnesses

The President of course can’t just disappear in the White House without any staffers or Secret Service
agents seeing him. Lewinsky apparently said in one phone call that she thought she and Clinton had been
busted in the act, and that’s why she was transferred to the Pentagon. But she wasn't sure, and
it doesn’t sound like her behavior in general was super-discreet, so that’s just a hunch.
Special Prosecutor Ken Starr is beating the bushes to find any witnesses, perhaps among Secret Service agents who
are generally reluctant to break their discretion with the President. The Dallas Morning News reported that one agent
was prepared to testify they witnessed sex. Then they retracted the story, saying they had some facts wrong. Now they
say that an agent witnessed "an ambiguous situation", presumably something like Lewinsky or the president
straightening their clothes or zipping up or something.

-- Videotape

CNN found a videotape of White House staffers congratulating Clinton after his reelection. Lewinsky appears with the President, looking flirty
and wearing a black beret (1992 Donna Karan, if you must know. About $38.) She gives the President a warm hug and whispers something to him.
Again, it doesn’t prove anything but it sure doesn’t look that innocent, either.

By indirect witnesses, we mean people that the principals -- Lewinsky and Clinton -- spoke to before this incident became
public. Linda Tripp is of course the main such source, but her audiotapes overshadow what she remembers.

She now says that she was present at Lewinsky's apartment (as an overnight guest) when Monica got a 2:00am phone call from the president.
She says that she heard Lewinsky's side of the phone call, and that the two discussed the call immediately afterwards. In response,
Lewinsky's attorney Ginsburg denied that Tripp overheard any such phone call. He said on ABC's "20/20" that "`sometimes people don't always tell the truth, sometimes there are exaggerations" and that Tripp's charge
"looks more like the pre-publicity for a book than it does like the truth.''

Dennis Lytton, a former Pentagon intern during the time Lewinksy worked there, now says he dated her briefly and she told him she had sex with the President.
He says they went out twice and often had lunch together, and that she told him "you could say that I earned my presidential kneepads." (see next item.)
He says he didn't want to hear more and cut off the conversation. Lytton was at the Pentagon from June 23, 1997 to August 29, 1997, according to a Pentagon spokesman.

Andy Bleiler is a former drama teacher at Beverly Hills High, which Lewinsky attended through her junior year. He says he
had a 5-year affair with Lewinksy, starting after she graduated, and her attorney confirmed that claim. Bleiler
says that he tried to end the affair, but that Lewinsky threatened to tell his wife Kathy. In fact, Lewinsky befriended
Kathy and confided in her. But she also bragged to several of her friends, and word got back to Kathy. The Bleilers are in counseling now.

Before she left for Washington, Kathy says that Lewinsky told her "I'm going to the White House to get my
presidential kneepads." Later, she called both Kathy and Andy and told them of an affair with a "high-ranking person in the White House."
She didn't name this person but called him "the creep" on one occasion.

Lewinsky also told them, the couple says, that she only had oral sex with this person and was frustrated that she didn't have regular sex.
She also told Kathy that she had gotten pregnant and had an abortion, presumably from a different relationship. Also, Lewinsky sent them
a series of documents and photographs (none of Lewinsky and the President) that they have turned over the the Special Prosecutor's office.

While their recollections support some aspects of her story indirectly, the Bleilers '' would both describe Monica during the time they knew her as having a pattern of twisting facts,
especially to enhance her own version of her own self-image,'' their attorney said in a statement. They also described her as "obsessed with sex" and say that they did not believe her sexual boasts, then or now,
and believe that she was recounting fantasies.

It's not clear that the "high White House official" would necessarily mean Clinton. Unnamed co-workers of Lewinsky at the Pentagon told Newsweek that
she "bragged about romantic flings with a midlevel civilian official at Defense and a colonel working on the Joint Staff (both men told friends the stories were untrue)."

-- Lewinsky was not a White House Intern at the time of her alleged affair with Clinton, according to what she says on one of Linda Tripp's tapes. She had finished
the internship and already had a government job.

-- The "talking points" that tell Linda Tripp to lie in her affidavit don't concern Lewinsky at all; they about another woman, Katherine Willey, who Clinton is alleged to have made out with at almost
the exact time her husband committed suicide over financial wrongdoing.

-- Vernon Jordan actually arranged 3 job interviews for Lewinsky. She was rejected by American Express and Burson-Marsteller; only Revlon (of which Jordan is a Director) hired her. They later took it
back after this news story broke.

-- Linda Tripp asked her own attorney (Kirby Behre, at the time) to arrange for her to wear a wire to her lunch with Monica Lewinsky. When he turned her down, she fired him, and contacted Special Prosecutor Starr,
whose office arranged the taping.

-- Clinton admitted to having sex with Gennifer Flowers "once, in 1977" according to the most specific leak from his deposition in the Paula Jones case. No one is saying who leaked the deposition, though
Jones' attorneys are the obvious suspects. Another source said that he admitted sex "as defined broadly by Paula Jones' attorneys."

-- Bob Dole is Monica Lewinsky's next door neighbor in the Watergate Apartments. (Lewinsky lives with her mother there.) He says he occasionally greeted them but doesn't know them.

-- And Bob Bennett, the President's lawyer in the Paula Jones case, is the older brother of William Bennett, the conservative moralist, writer and Education Secretary under Ronald Reagan (who once dated Janis Joplin.)

You might think that Paula Jones' lawyers have found lots of women claiming sex or harassment from Clinton; conservative sources have alleged "over 100" women were on Jones' lawyers' list. However,
according to a story in the New York Times, they have found only three women who confirmed sexual encounters of any type with Clinton. (A fourth, former Miss America Elizabeth Gracen,
later admitted sleeping with Clinton in 1983.)

The first of course is Gennifer Flowers; Clinton confirmed having sex with her "once, in 1977" using the broad
definition of sex used by Paula Jones' attorneys in their question. Flowers also claims that Clinton
assigned a staffer to get her a government job. No word on whether he was asked about that.

Another is Katherine Willey, who confirmed reports of being kissed and fondled by Clinton
when she went to talk to ask him for a job. (A friend of hers, Julie Steele, first confirmed her story to Newseek reporter Michael Isikoff, then later said that Willey called her and told her what to say.) Linda Tripp is
in fact the first person who saw Willey after the incident; she said her clothes were mussed and lipstick smeared but that she seemed happy. Tripp claims she started taping Lewinsky because CLinton's lawyer attacked her statement to Newsweek in
the Willey case.

The third woman is Dolly Kyle Browning, who grew up with Clinton and said in an
affidavit that she had an affair with him which ended before he became President.
She wrote a thinly veiled book about Clinton and women recently.

The fourth woman is former Miss America (and Highlander actress) Elizabeth Ward Gracen. She initially denied having sex with Clinton.
However, the Paula Jones attorneys actually claimed that Clinton had raped her, based on a statement by Gracen's friend Judy Stokes that Gracen told her this.
Gracen held a press conference admitting that she slept with Clinton in 1983 (when she was 22 and both were married), but says that it was a consensual one night stand.

One other woman, Texas college professor Joyce Miller, says that one of Clinton's troopers gave her
his card and said that Clinton found her attractive. She replied that she wasn't interested and it ended
there, though she kept the card and passed it on to Paula Jones' attorneys. Two other women said that
state troopers escorted them to Clinton's office, or Clinton to their homes, but that nothing sexual ocurred.

Other women whose names have been reported in the press as possible liaisons, but have denied any assignation.
Examples include Sheila Lawrence (widow of the Ambassador Larry Lawrence, formerly of Arlington National Cemetery) and the daughter of Walter Mondale.